When Calculus of Loss Doesn’t Add Up

IF you start from the premise that every human life is of equal importance, then the judgments of news organizations will often be confounding.

Because when it comes to coverage, some violent deaths — to misquote Orwell — are more equal than others.

Such was the case earlier this month, when the Western news media, including The Times, was fixated on the attacks that left 17 victims and three gunmen dead in Paris. Coverage was wall to wall: In The Times, not a day went by, for 10 consecutive days, without at least one front-page story, usually two.

Meanwhile, in a much more remote part of the world, the radical group Boko Haram had devastated the town of Baga in rural Nigeria. Early reports said that as many as 2,000 had been slain.

In the first days, The Times barely took note. The first staff-written report appeared in print a week after the attack; it didn’t make the front page and was of a modest length. Over the week that followed, coverage of the killings appeared on The Times’s front page only once — in the form of a large satellite map. (The accompanying story ran inside the paper.)

By that point, readers were complaining. Mark Solomon wrote on Jan. 9: “The Boko Haram massacre is timely, heartbreaking and directly relevant to the major news story of the day. One could argue — quite rationally I would say — that it IS the major news story of the day.” His subject line read: “Where is the Boko Haram story?”

Another reader, Karen Delince, told me that she kept checking both the paper and the Times website and could not find any coverage of the Nigerian massacre. On Twitter, the media-tech mogul Om Malik asked me to investigate the disparity in the Paris and Nigeria coverage, and pointed his 1.4 million followers to an article, titled “Honor Every Death” by Ethan Zuckerman of M.I.T., that documented the “scant media attention” for the Nigerian killings.

Indeed, Times coverage seemed both light and late.

Dev Patel, a Harvard Crimson staffer, wrote to me about the Reuters brief that ran the day after the Jan. 3 attack: “Those four sentences constitute 100 percent of the Times’ coverage of the massacre in Baga last weekend.” As a student journalist, “I am wondering why the Times’ news staff has essentially ignored the tragedy in Nigeria while the much smaller-scale terrorist attack in Paris has received such intense attention.”

I posed these questions to three international editors last week. All were quick to point out that The Times’s West Africa correspondent, Adam Nossiter, has done extraordinary work on Boko Haram for years. He was writing powerful enterprise pieces about the group long before it surfaced into the global consciousness by kidnapping hundreds of girls last April.

Joseph Kahn, The Times’s top-ranking editor for international news, told me that the Paris and Nigeria stories aren’t comparable. “These were totally different challenges,” he said, with the former happening in a major Western capital where The Times has a substantial staff.

He, and others, spoke of the difficulty of covering the Boko Haram story because of its remote location, the problems of verification, and the questions hanging over early reports. While Amnesty International was reporting as many as 2,000 dead, he told me, some trusted experts were cautioning against using the number. The Times needed to verify what had happened, something best done on the ground. But getting there is both difficult and time-consuming.

In retrospect, Mr. Kahn said, a story about the controversy over the numbers would have been one way to provide early and meaningful coverage — informing readers without falling prey to overstating what had happened. Such a story, especially if it had been prominently displayed and published quickly, would have been a valuable way to be transparent with readers about what The Times knew and what it didn’t know.

Mr. Kahn also said that while the Paris attack had an intense and short news arc, the Boko Haram story would continue and that The Times would keep covering it with commitment. The editor on the International Desk who handles Africa coverage, Greg Winter, told me last week that Mr. Nossiter (who has also been a leading reporter on the Ebola story) was in Nigeria again working on a major Boko Haram piece.

“I understand readers’ concerns about covering Nigeria, and I share them, which is why our correspondent has risked his life for years to cover the country and the turmoil in the north,” Mr. Winter said.

I asked Mr. Kahn how, in general, the numbers of violent deaths figure into editorial decisions. “We don’t cover everything equally,” he said. “It goes to gut news judgment, as we ask: ‘Is this a big deal? Are we going to deploy someone?’ ” Among the factors: “The circumstances, how unusual it is, the location, the relevance to American interests.”

And, he said, The Times has to be careful not to overreport violent death.

“Not every incident of carnage is a major story for The New York Times. You have to put it in context, and not fill the news report with unlimited doses of terrible violent news from around the world.”

But, speaking of the recent Boko Haram attack, he said: “It could have had more attention and emphasis.”

I agree. I have no objection to the extent of the Paris coverage. But whatever the calculus of news judgments, these lost Nigerian lives surely were worthy of The Times’s immediate, as well as its continuing, attention.

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In the Public Editor’s Journal, I took up a complaint by the F.B.I. director, James Comey, about granting anonymity to an Al Qaeda source, wrote that The Times should have published the cover image of Charlie Hebdo’s post-attack edition and considered The Times’s policy on vulgarity.